Mayor Dave Bing speaks with the Detroit Free Press from his office in the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center in Detroit, Monday, April 29, 2013. / Kathleen Galligan/Detroit Free Press

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Detroit Free Press Editorial Board

Detroit Free Press Editorial Board

That’s how Detroit Auditor General Mark Lockridge described a budget proposed to little fanfare last month by Detroit Mayor Dave Bing.

It’s true that Detroit’s financial situation is dismal, and it’s likely that crafting a sound budget would prove challenging to any mayor. But that’s not where the auditor general’s critique centers:

“It is one thing to not have control over declining revenues or rising costs of providing services. It is another thing to not have basic and detailed internal financial reporting,” Lockridge wrote.

It’s the lack of internal controls, or basic data about the city’s financial position, that has led Detroit into its current quandary. For a decade, the city has run deficits, and leaders have made decisions based on flawed information.

Bing was supposed to change all of that.

For the hardy few who have made a practice of reading Detroit budgets, and the subsequent auditorial reports, Lockridge’s findings will sound familiar: overly optimistic revenues, figures presented sans explanatory calculations, underestimates of overtime, and a general category dubbed “other expenses,” which has been cut by $110 million — but those savings aren’t fully explained.

There’s another item that will prompt déjà vu in Detroit budget wonks: Bing has underestimated the deficit by $30 million, the auditor general writes. Bing, who did not include the accumulated deficit in the budget with the permission of the state Department of Treasury, pegs the deficit at $348 million; Lockridge says it’s $378 million.

(The Treasury Department, Lockridge writes, gave this instruction because there is a plan in place to address the deficit, and state requirements for deficit reporting are meant to refer to temporary shortfalls, not long-term problems.)

Bing, a businessman, was elected in 2009 on a pledge to revamp Detroit’s antiquated systems, to instill best practices from the corporate world in the management of the city and its dwindling supply of cash.

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And, for a while, things looked promising. A pro bono turnaround team helmed by Denise Ilitch, Freman Hendrix and retired auto exec Joe Walsh produced a thick report of recommendations to make Detroit’s bureaucracy run more smoothly. Then came an operations restructuring effort; the mayor pulled the plug on that project and hired a team of consultants, also charged with developing a government restructuring plan. But few of the recommended changes were made.

The mayor is deciding whether to seek a second term in office; any re-election bid by Bing must be viewed in the frame of his failure not only to balance the city’s budget — we accept that this feat may have been outside the power of any official bound to act within the constraints of normal government processes — but to regularize its systems, to provide sound financial reporting, to accurately quantify the depth and breadth of the city’s problems. These tasks should not have been beyond Bing’s control.

It’s also important to remember that for eight months, Bing was empowered by the financial stability agreement with the state to operate outside the bounds of traditional government processes. Some cuts detailed in that agreement, required to bring expenditures down, still haven’t been made — Lockridge’s report notes that the amount Bing budgets for employee benefits is reasonable only if changes listed in the financial stability agreement are enacted.